Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

Parashat B'ha·alot'kha
Numbers 8:1-12:16
June 24, 2000 21 Sivan 5760

Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

My father liked to study hands, not to predict the future but to judge
character. An amateur graphologist, he had concluded that our hands are
an even more revealing extension of our personality than our
handwriting. The interest was a great ice–breaker. He would often ask
guests visiting our home for the first time to show him their hands,
palms down and held together in a triangle. After a brief gaze, he
would offer a few comments about their personality type, talents and
values. He was rarely way off. Though I failed to acquire his
expertise, I remained ever sensitive to the expressiveness of hands.

A few weeks ago, I had the thrill to meet "Hammerin Hank" Aaron at the
Tufts University commencement where we both received honorary degrees.
In case you have forgotten, he is the hall–of–famer who holds the
record for home runs (755), runs–batted–in (2,297), total bases (6,856)
and extra–base hits (1,477) compiled in a 23–year career in which he
also had the remarkable lifetime batting average of .305. To my
astonishment, there was nothing oversized in Aaron's stature or physique
to account for his prowess. The secret to his feats lay in his hands —
large, strong and beautifully proportioned. They still embodied the
speed and strength, the iron will and keen intelligence which sustained
such a high level of play over so many years. For me, those wonderful
hands declaimed that ultimately consistency is the key to greatness.

The role assigned to hands may likewise be an indicator of a religion's
character, one for example that illuminates a fundamental difference
between Judaism and Christianity. A detail in this week's parashah
prompts me to take up the subject.

The Levites are inducted to replace the first born Israelites to
service the Tabernacle. The latter lost their privilege after they had
succumbed to worshiping the Golden Calf. In contrast, the Levites had
remained staunchly loyal to Moses despite his absence (Exodus 32). In
the purification rite for the Levites there are two rapid symbolic hand
gestures. First, the Israelites or their elders lay their hands upon
the Levites and the Levites in turn lay their hands upon two bulls to be
sacrificed as a sin offering and a burnt offering "to make expiation for
the Levites (Numbers 8:11–12)." Ritual language is by definition
multivalent. Whereas the first instance suggests an act of voluntary
transference from Israelites to Levites, the second is an act of
ownership by which the Levites collectively declare that the bulls meant
to purge the Tabernacle of any impurities caused by them indeed belong
to them (Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus, Anchor Bible, pp. 150–153).

Moreover, the inauguration of the Levites is not an isolated use of
hands for ritual purposes. Nearly every individual (and even one
communal) sacrifice offered on the altar of the Tabernacle was preceded
by a gesture of ownership, that is pressing, and not simply placing, one
hand upon the animal to signify that in all the tumult attending the
cult, this quadruped is actually mine (Leviticus 1:5; 3:2, 8, 13; 4:4,
15, 24, 29, 33).

To convey the idea of transference apparently required the use of two
hands. Prof. Milgrom points to the awesome Yom Kippur purgation in the
Tabernacle where the High Priest would rest both his hands heavily on
the head of the scapegoat before confessing the sins of the people and
dispatching it into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:21). Similarly, in the
instance of the blasphemer put to death by stoning, those who heard him
passively without protest were obliged to place their hands on his head
prior to his execution (Leviticus 24:10–14). Again sin was eliminated
by shifting the guilt (Milgrom, pp. 1041–1044).

Outside the cult, the laying on of hands functioned to symbolize the
transference of authority from master to disciple. Prior to his death
Moses conferred leadership upon Joshua, his chosen successor by placing
both his hands upon him, "before Eleazar the priest and before the whole
community (Numbers 27:22)." And a thousand years later the Rabbis
adapted this Mosaic paradigm as the rite by which they bestowed
juridical and spiritual authority on their most accomplished students.
Though ordination by hands was restricted to Palestine and eventually
fell into disuse, the terminology of semikhah (the laying on of hands)
for rabbinic ordination today echoes its distant origins. Most
interesting is the fact that Maimonides could not conceive of Moses as
conferring an iota of his charisma upon the seventy elders he needed to
lighten his daily burdens without laying his hands on their heads (which
occurs in our parasha, Numbers 11), though there is no trace of such an
act in the biblical text itself (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Sanhedrin 4:1).

The New Testament, in contrast, employs the laying on of hands for an
utterly different purpose, namely to heal the sick. As Jesus
established his ministry in Galilee, he restored the dead and afflicted
to good health by use of his hands. One synagogue president said to
him: "My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and
she will live." Jesus accompanied him, "went into the room and took the
girl by the hand, and she got up (Matthew 9:22, 25)." Elsewhere, the
Gospel reports that, "At sunset all who had friends suffering from one
disease or another brought them to him; and he laid his hands on them
one by one and cured them (Luke 5:13)." On still other occasions, Jesus
with the touch of hands banished blindness (Matthew 9:29) and leprosy
(Luke 5:13) and revived from the bier the dead son of a widow (Luke
7:14). And in the spirit of this tradition, some Evangelical Christians
still effect healing by laying hands upon the stricken.

While Hebrew Scripture has no exact parallel to these stories, Moses
and Aaron in Egypt and at the Sea of Reeds most certainly brought about
miracles by the use of rods clearly endowed with special power. But the
pervasive rationalist bent of the Mishnah sought to diminish the belief
in such extraordinary events. Moses did not help his soldiers defeat
the Amalekites by holding his hand aloft (Exodus 17:11–12), nor did
looking at a copper serpent atop a standard heal a person bitten by a
snake (Numbers 21:9). In both cases, insisted the Mishnah, victory and
recovery were the result of an inner transformation. Imbued with deep
faith in God, the ancient Israelites were able to stay out of harm's way
(Rosh Hashanah 3:8).

No religion is wholly unalloyed or entirely consistent. Yet what
essentially separates Judaism from Christianity is a matter of
temperament. In the garb of symbolic language, the laying on of hands
in the Torah leaves the outside world visibly unchanged. The ritual
transforms the inner state of its human participants. Not so in the
Gospel, where the act operates instrumentally altering the external
state of the recipient. The two religions differ on the degree to which
the world can be modified by piety and ritual. It is no accident that
Judaism, for which the conquest of the world begins with the painstaking
conquest of ourselves, has no sacraments.